Seminar: Strategic transmission of information

Abstract : What information one has to transmit when the receiver has a different objective from the sender ? Originally in the Economics literature, the problem of ``Strategic Information Transmission'' arises in decentralized networks when the users are considered as players, that choose autonomously a transmission scheme in order to maximize their own utility function. The key difference with conventional communication paradigm is that the meaning of the information symbol has to be considered carefully. Indeed, each information might have a different impact on the utility functions of the users, hence it has to be compressed and transmitted accordingly. Instead of ensuring reliable transmission, the goal of the encoder is to manipulate the posterior beliefs of the decoder in order to influence its action. We provide a unified approach to this problem by generalizing the Rate-Distortion results in Information Theory and the Persuasion results in Game Theory. By using the tool of ``Empirical Coordination'', we characterize the optimal ``Strategic Transmission in terms of a concavification over the space of the posterior beliefs, under a mean entropy constraint.
Bio : Maël Le Treust earned his Diplôme dEtude Approfondies (M.Sc.) degree in Optimization, Game Theory & Economics (OJME) from the Université de Paris VI (UPMC), France in 2008 and his Ph.D. degree from the Université de Paris Sud XI in 2011, at the Laboratoire des signaux et systèmes (joint laboratory of CNRS, Supélec, Université de Paris Sud XI) in Gif-sur-Yvette, France. Since 2013, he is a CNRS researcher at ETIS laboratory UMR 8051, Université Paris Seine, Université Cergy-Pontoise, ENSEA, CNRS, in Cergy, France. In 2012, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Institut d'électronique et d'informatique Gaspard Monge (Université Paris-Est) in Marne-la-Vallée, France. In 2012-2013, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Centre Énergie, Matériaux et Télécommunication (Université INRS ) in Montréal, Canada. From 2008 to 2012, he was a Math T.A. at the Université de Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), Université de Paris VI (UPMC) and Université Paris Est Marne-la-Vallée, France. His research interests are strategic coordination, information theory, Shannon theory, game theory, physical layer security and wireless communications.